February 3, 2006

High oil prices. Populism is a winning political strategy when you have lots of windfall oil profits to spend on publicity stunts.

Speaking of publicity stunts, the People's Cube reports that the Iranian President is really just a spoof inspired by the success of Sacha Baron-Cohen's "Borat" character:

Looking back, we can only laugh at our unblinking acceptance of Ahmadinejad, an "Islamist hard-liner" dressed like a Turkish used car salesman, who called to wipe Israel off the map or move it to Alaska, demanded a manual recount of Holocaust victims, and banned all Western music. His retractions were even more bizarre: "CNN make lie! I send squeegees to help Israel, not 'Wipe off Israel!' Who translated, I kill him!"

High oil prices. Populism is a winning political strategy when you have lots of windfall oil profits to spend on publicity stunts.

Speaking of publicity stunts, the People's Cube reports that the Iranian President is really just a spoof inspired by the success of Sacha Baron-Cohen's "Borat" character:

Looking back, we can only laugh at our unblinking acceptance of Ahmadinejad, an "Islamist hard-liner" dressed like a Turkish used car salesman, who called to wipe Israel off the map or move it to Alaska, demanded a manual recount of Holocaust victims, and banned all Western music. His retractions were even more bizarre: "CNN make lie! I send squeegees to help Israel, not 'Wipe off Israel!' Who translated, I kill him!"

High oil prices. Populism is a winning political strategy when you have lots of windfall oil profits to spend on publicity stunts.

Speaking of publicity stunts, the People's Cube reports that the Iranian President is really just a spoof inspired by the success of Sacha Baron-Cohen's "Borat" character:

Looking back, we can only laugh at our unblinking acceptance of Ahmadinejad, an "Islamist hard-liner" dressed like a Turkish used car salesman, who called to wipe Israel off the map or move it to Alaska, demanded a manual recount of Holocaust victims, and banned all Western music. His retractions were even more bizarre: "CNN make lie! I send squeegees to help Israel, not 'Wipe off Israel!' Who translated, I kill him!"

Who was the genius who chose February for Black History Month? First you have Kwanzaa, then the MLK Day frenzy in mid-January, and then two weeks later, boom, it starts all over again.

I bet that, by February 2nd, even Al Sharpton is sick of Black History Month. I can picture the Rev. Al easing into his Barcalounger and flipping on his plasma screen:

"Let's see if there's anything good on television … Oh boy, another Harriet Tubman documentary [CLICK] … Uh oh, a panel discussion on W.E.B. Dubois [CLICK] … Hey, it's that groundhog, Pungobungy Pete, or whatever they call him … and he can see his shadow! Now, that's great TV!"

February 2, 2006

Destiny Campbell, the 3-year-old girl in Delaware who was severely mauled by a relative's pit bull earlier this week, remains in critical but stable condition. One bit of good news: the dog, which was put down, has been determined to be non-rabid.

In this week's "Fact" article in The New Yorker, "Troublemakers: What pit bulls can teach us about profiling," Malcolm Gladwell mounts a deeply disingenuous 4,800 word attack on racial profiling by way of defending pit bulls from legal persecution. According to Mr. Gladwell, his contract with The New Yorker requires him to publish 40,000-50,000 words per year in that magazine. According to New York magazine, his salary is $250,000. (On top of this he makes about $750,000 annually from public speaking, as well as million-plus book advances, and the sale of Blink to the movies, where Leonardo DiCaprio is slated to play him.)

So, Mr. Gladwell was paid roughly $25,000 for his intentionally misleading article on pit bulls. What could be more appropriate than that he donate that $25,000 to a fund for the care of little Destiny?

Of course, this is just one particular definition of intelligence, one created by humans trying to get productive work out of dogs. From a dog's point of view, a workaholic breed like the Border Collie might seem pretty stupid. Why work as hard as a Border Collie does when you can get people to feed you anyway just by being lovable? A cat would think a Border Collie is a complete moron.

Still, in my limited experience, any conceivable measure of intelligence would have to rank Afghans as dumb as a box of rocks. I was at a picnic once where I was given a huge steak. I finished half of it, and didn't know what to do with the other half, when an Afghan gamboled up, begging food. I held up the steak to him, which riveted his attention. Then I decided to put it behind my back to tease him momentarily. Within two seconds of my hiding the steak behind my back, he forgot all about it and ran off.

By the way, Collies, which, as I recall from my childhood, used to devise brilliant mechanisms for rescuing Timmy from the quicksand every Sunday evening at 7pm, have been getting dumber and dumber, according to animal science professor (and famous autistic) Temple Grandin. Breeders have been narrowing down the skulls of collies for aesthetic effect, which doesn't leave much room for brains.

And thanks for all the hypoallergenic dog tips, but my son's asthma has gotten better so, when somebody offered us a Fila Brasileiro pup, we took him up on it.

None of Woody Allen's three dozen movies has made much over 40 million dollars at the box office, and the last one to do that well was "Hannah and Her Sisters" two decades ago.

Yet Woody's reputation among film critics and Academy Award voters remains curiously exalted. His screenplay nomination for his new film "Match Point" gives him 20 directing and screenwriting Oscar nods, putting him one past Billy Wilder ("Some Like It Hot," "Sunset Blvd.," "Double Indemnity" and other movies more memorable than anything Woody has done) to make him, theoretically, best auteur ever.

In reality, Woody is more like the Pete Rose of the movies -- not quite gifted enough to swing for the fences, but, due to a prodigious work ethic ("Eighty percent of success is showing up," he claims), has still amassed a remarkable number of singles and the occasional double.

Lately, though, Woody has generated mostly strikeouts like last spring's "Melinda and Melinda," in which the only entertainment derived from the self-parody of casting big Will Ferrell as the Woody Allen Character.

The analogy of Peter Rose to Woody Allen is actually fairly close in terms of the shape of their careers over time, as measured in hitting performance and box office performance. (Their personalities seem completely different, but that's only when you compare Pete Rose to the "Woody Allen" you know in the movies.) Comparing a writer-director to a baseball player may seem very odd, but Woody's habit of pounding out one movie per year makes his box office statistics surprisingly comparable to a baseball player's annual statistics.

Pete came up to the majors in 1963 at the age of 22 and was at his offensive peak from roughly his 6th through 14th seasons (1968-1976) and then entered a long decline phase that ran out through his 24th season in 1986. His best hitting seasons were his sixth and seventh (1968 and 1969)

Rose took longer to become an outstanding hitter than almost all the other superstars in baseball history, not surpassing 150% of the league's average until he was 27. But he stayed a first rate hitter for an extraordinarily long time, not dropping below 115% of the league average until he was 39.

Woody directed his first movie ("What's Up Tiger Lilly?") in 1966 and then reached his commercial peak with his 7th film, "Annie Hall," which made $38 million (probably about $100 million at today's ticket prices). He reached $40 million with his 9th film, "Manhattan," in 1979, and then began a very long decline phase. Beginning with "Annie Hall," he's written and directed slightly more than one movie per year for three decades, which is an almost unheard of page these days. For example, Steven Spielberg, who is extremely efficient, has directed about one film every year and a half over the same time period, and he doesn't write scripts.

If the movie business was as objectively measured as is baseball, Wood probably would have had to retire from the auteur role about a decade ago because his recent film's financial returns have generally, as far as I can estimate, been consistently negative. My guess is that he's been carried by rich investors who want to be able to boast that they financed a Woody Allen movie. In return, Woody is very careful not to go over budget, so his investors know their loss will be limited. He's also very disciplined about sticking to his pre-ordained shooting schedule, which allows him to recruit Hollywood superstars who have a couple of weeks open on their schedule.

However, "Match Point," which marks a stylistic departure from the increasingly indistinguishable Woody Allen films of yore, will be his biggest box office product since 2000, and maybe, when it's through, since 1989 (but not in inflation adjusted terms).

Both Pete and Woody suffered from notorious scandals about 15 years ago, although baseball's standards are stricter than the movie industry's for punishing scandals.

is now up at GNXP. Lynn, the co-author of 2002's IQ and the Wealth of Nations, is back with a new tome summarizing the results of additional research. He now has summarized 620 different IQ studies from around the world, about four times the number reported in IQ and the Wealth of Nations[Here's the table I constructed of the 168 IQ studies cited in his 2002 book.]. The studies in the new book cover 813,778 tested individuals.

While his last book was organized by country, this one is organized by race. Lynn's new book validates my conclusion about his last one:

Ultimately, though, it is hard to avoid concluding that intellectual and income differences between nations stem to some extent from genetic differences. The results simply cluster too much by race.

This does not mean all differences are caused by genes. For example, I wrote in 2002:

A clear example of how a bad environment can hurt IQ can be seen in the IQ scores for sub-Saharan African countries. They average only around 70. In contrast, African-Americans average about 85. It appears unlikely that African-Americans’ white admixture can account for most of this 15-point gap because they are only around 17%-18% white on average, according to the latest genetic research.

Lynn echoes this, pointing to nutritional shortfalls suffered by Africans as a sizable contributor to their low IQ scores.

Malloy's 13,000 word review is extraordinary. It critically reviews each chapter in the book, evaluates Lynn's arguments, explains where he gets off track (Lynn is 76 years old and far from infallible), and suggests additional data and ideas.

Given that the incidence of fatality associated with ostensibly vicious dog breeds (132 total deaths over a two decade period attributed to "pit-bull type breeds," pure-bred Rottweilers, and German Shepards combined) is profoundly smaller than that associated with firearms (or cigarette lighters, bathtubs, automobiles, etc), it wouldn't take much of a crime-deterring counter-effect to offset the headline-grabbing horror stories.

There is no question that many people choose to keep notorious dog breeds precisely because of the protective benefits they imagine such dogs will provide.

Another reader, however, writes:

Having been a fan of German cars for many years and having kept a wide and somewhat disreputable-looking bunch of 911s, 914s, 944, and VWs of all sorts alive and running, I spend a lot of time in junkyards...

On these trips underneath and inside of 40 years of West German iron, I've encountered a lot of junkyard dogs. Very few were pit bulls or even pit mixes. Almost all were shepherd crosses of some kind and the occasional rott mix.

Pit bulls make lousy guard dogs -- they seem unclear on the concept. They can be dangerous, but they don't "guard" very well unless it is a person they are fond of. When you see a "pit attack" they either have a pit mix, the pit has been trained to attack, or they have been so poorly socialized that attacking seems like the thing to do at the time. Properly socialized pits, owned by retired Exxon executives or commercial builders (to name two examples down my street) tend to gain weight and yawn a lot and that's about it.

Just as when you have a German Shepherd bite incident you should look at the family situation (if there is a lot of conflict in a family, dogs will be uncertain of the pack structure and that really wears on German Shepherds), a pit bite incident should fall right back on the family situation.

Okay, but there are a lot of things, such as, say, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, that would be perfectly safe in the hands of "retired Exxon executives," but which aren't legal because not everybody is a retired Exxon executive. Indeed, the correlation between the kind of people who could own extremely dangerous things at no risk to the public safety and the kind of people who really want to own the dangerous stuff tends to be sharply negative.

My vague impression from watching people walk dogs is that the German shepherd is the most popular breed among urban blacks. Whereas suburban whites choose lovey-dovey wouldn't-hurt-a-fly retrievers to minimize the damage their dogs do to other people, urban blacks tend to choose, quite rationally, a smart, normally well-adjusted breed that offers excellent protection against intruders while not being terribly dangerous to friends and family.

Judging by the ads for pit bulls, however, a lot of people who buy pit bulls aren't looking for protection for their family. Instead, they are looking for either cannon fodder for organized dog fights, dogs that will intimidate their neighbors and neighbors' dogs, four-legged symbols of their own machismo, or insanely terrifying dogs (such as, beside pit bulls, the Presa Canario or the Detroit Rock Dog) to guard their drug dealing businesses. As evidence for this, notice how, now that I've mentioned golden retrievers in this bl-g, I've gotten a much more benign sort of dog ad showing up to the right (e.g., "Golden Retriever Puppies: gentle, loving, beautiful") than when I was talking about pit bulls (e.g., "Monster California Pits: Big Butthead size blue pit bull pups. Puppies will be huge in body & head"). The pit bull ads appear to be aimed at flaming jerks.

In summary, you'll have more problems with bad dogs where you have more bad people. Sometimes you find bad people in nice neighborhoods, like that incredibly vile San Francisco lawyer couple who were breeding Presa Canarios to sell to Mexican meth labs when two of the beasts ripped to shreds the lady lacrosse coach next door.

But, in general, you'll find more bad people, and thus more bad dogs, in bad neighborhoods. What can we do about the bad person -- bad dog nexus? Well, maybe not all that much. But one obvious reform to ameliorate this social problem in the long term, as well as so many other problems, is: Don't make it worse by letting more bad people into the country.

A taste for dog fighting, which appears to be the largest driving force behind the dog mauling problem, is specific to certain cultures and certain social classes within those cultures. With a whole world of potential immigrants to choose among, why let in lots of people who come from backgrounds where dog fighting is popular?

The day after I wrote about Malcolm Gladwell's disingenuous article in the New Yorker claiming that profiling pit bulls is as wrong as profiling young black males standing on street corners or young Arab men getting on airliners, we see this story from the Philadelphia area:

New Castle County Police said a three-year-old girl was critically injured after reportedly being attacked by a Pit Bull Monday. The dog was euthanized Tuesday morning.

Paramedics responded to reports of an attack on a small child by the family dog on the 100 block of Oakmont Drive just after 10:30 a.m. officials said.

When they arrived on the scene, authorities said they discovered three-year-old Destiny Campbell suffering from massive head injuries. She was transported to Christiana Hospital in critical condition.

Police said a four-year-old Pit Bull named ‘Diamond,’ allegedly mauled the child while she was with her mother at her grandmother’s house.

Destiny and her mother, Alycia Campbell, were picking up the child’s grandmother when the dog, belonging to an older cousin, Turquoise Robinson, attacked the three-year-old for no apparent reason.

“I tried everything to get her (Diamond) off my child, you know, I couldn’t do anything. I tried beating her with a cane, I tried everything, she swung her side to side like a ragdoll,” said Alycia Campbell.

After several attempts to free Campbell, her mother and grandmother screamed for help. Residents in the area responded, striking the dog with sticks and broom handles until it released the child.

“The dog had grabbed her by the crown and pulled off her scalp and bit off her right ear. She was in a state of shock,” said neighbor Toney Jackson.

A reader comments:

In my experience, the vast majority of not just aggressive, but *dangerous* dogs are owned by a certain type of black male. They identify with the aggressive attitudes of dogs in the way they identify with the aggressive attitude of gangsta rap artists. The dogs become an affectation intended to reflect the toughness of the owner.

He points to a new breed I hadn't heard of, the American Mastiff (a.k.a., "Panja" or "Detroit rock dog"). DogBreedInfo.com explains:

The American Mastiff (Panja) has a dark origin. Originally they were used (and unfortunately some still are) to guard drug dealer's houses, property, and yes their drugs. They had to be intimidating and not too "friendly" with strangers, but allow traffic. They have a tendency to be aloof with new people, but allow entrance. The American Mastiffs were trained to allow under no circumstances access to property; they were set to guard. The breed first appeared in the Detroit Metro area as a cross breed of several dogs. Pitbulls and Rottweilers are known influences of this breed. Before being registered with the DRA in 1996, they were simply known as "rock dogs". However, since the DRA has recognized them, a good number of these dogs are not drug-guarding dogs, but loving pets.

Back in the day, the Oscars gave at least some nods to European talent. For example, Federico Fellini earned a dozen Oscar nominations (four for Directing, eight in the two screenwriting categories). These days, cinematically, the Europeans are in decline, but the Chinese are ascendant. Yet, In 2004, the stunning "Hero" received no nominations, and this year Wong Kar-Wai's exquisite "2046" was shut out. Most unjustly, the Australian lensman Christopher Doyle, who shot both Chinese films and is usually considered the greatest cinematographer in the world, has yet to receive even a single Oscar nomination in his career. By way of contrast, "Memoirs of a Geisha," which is in style a sort of wan tribute to the new Chinese cinema, received six nominations in the technical categories.

"Hero" was ineligible last year, even though it earned a strong $57 million in the North American market after being released in August of 2004 because it had previously been nominated as Best Foreign Film in 2002 and lost to some Holocaust-related film. This year, "2046" may have been ineligible because an earlier version was screened at Cannes in 2004. The point is that the Academy should rethink its rules to stop excluding the best foreign films. (Of course, from the Academy's perspective, their reply might be, "If they want to get nominated, let them move to Hollywood like Ang Lee.")

Okay, I know that Zhang Yimou's lame follow-up to "Hero," "House of the Flying Daggers," got a cinematography nomination last year.

For me, nothing -- nothing -- has been more basic to my experience of the arts over the course of three decades than the fact that many talented and successful creative-types simply aren't very smart, and that many supersmart people who would like to be creative in the artistic sense simply don't have the creativity knack.

This isn't what I expected to find when I went into the arts, by the way. Like many Smart Kids, I'd been led by profs (and my own gullibility) to expect that brainpower was always and everywhere a good thing. That being so, and all other things being equal, Smart Kids would do better creatively in the arts than not-so-Smart Kids.

Wrong-o. Anything but.

I write as no G/IQ skeptic. I'm happy to agree that there's such a thing as cognitive horsepower, and that it tends to make a big difference in a person's life. But the arts seem to be a bit of an exception to many of the G/IQ-fundamentalist crowd's rules. [More]

I think it depends on the art form. Literature tends to attract high-IQ types. For example, Goethe, often considered the second greatest European writer after Shakespeare, was one of the most important botanists in history in his spare time.

On the other hand, popular music doesn't require much IQ to burn brightly for a few years. A clever performer like Madonna can use her general purpose brainpower to achieve a long career, but in the big picture, her whole body of work hardly compares to what a 2-digit IQ like Elvis Presley accomplished in about three years in the mid-50s. Similarly, my dark horse candidate for the truest genius of American popular music in my lifetime, Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone, is probably the worst decisionmaker ever in a business notoriously full of fools.

A British study shows a sharp decline in the number of children with a good grasp of everyday physics since the test was first given in 1976. The Times of London reports:

In the easiest question, children are asked to watch as water is poured up to the brim of a tall, thin container. From there the water is tipped into a small fat glass. The tall vessel is refilled. Do both beakers now hold the same amount of water? “It’s frightening how many children now get this simple question wrong,” says scientist Denise Ginsburg, Shayer’s wife and another of the research team.

Another question involves two blocks of a similar size — one of brass, the other of plasticine. Which would displace the most water when dropped into a beaker? children are asked. Two years ago fewer than a fifth came up with the right answer.

In 1976 a third of boys and a quarter of girls scored highly in the tests overall; by 2004, the figures had plummeted to just 6% of boys and 5% of girls. These children were on average two to three years behind those who were tested in the mid-1990s. ...

“By stressing the basics — reading and writing — and testing like crazy you reduce the level of cognitive stimulation. Children have the facts but they are not thinking very well,” says Adey. “And they are not getting hands-on physical experience of the way materials behave.”

I'd like to see some confirmation of this before accepting it on faith, but it's not implausible.

Think of Buster Keaton's silent film comedies, which are mostly about the uses and abuses of mechanical physics. Jim Emerson writes:

Keaton makes that leap of faith again and again in his films. He trusts the universe, no matter how many reasons it gives him not to. It may be an unfathomable and inhospitable place (no wonder Keaton was a favorite of the existentialists), but Buster intuitively grasps the underlying logic beneath all the confusion. Keaton's comedy is founded firmly on the principles of Newtonian physics, the invisible substructure that alone keeps the universe from simply flying apart in all directions...

From the raw material around him, Buster spontaneously creates simple makeshift contraptions that harness elemental principles of physics to keep him moving along through the maelstrom of modern life: a wheel, a lever, a crank, a ladder, a bucket, a siphon, a see-saw, a bridge, a boat, a balloon...

A film historian once pointed out that in Keaton's prime in the 1920s, most Americans had a more sophisticated understanding of pulleys, levers, and other machines than we do today. They constantly had to tinker with the mechanical world around them. His original audience's response to his character's incredible inventiveness was of the how-stupid-of-me-not-to-have-thought-of-that variety.

So, I wouldn't be astonished if this trend turns out to be true, but I'd like to see more evidence for it before I accept it.

Hey, if you can't trust spammers, who can you trust? He must have got my email address from Michael Ledeen:

Dear American Citizen,

... I am former official of the Iran government who lose his place after revolution. But before this time we have develop many valuable assets which this new government wants to take for its own. We have many billions in oil, strategic position in Persian Gulf, and many millions of dollars in fine carpets for export – and a freedom-loving people who cannot now have any say in this government which oppress us, and try to use it all for making nuclear weapons to threaten U.S. and allies.... Of course as this is business transaction, you and your country would receive 5% plus expenses of all we recover after government authorities are overthrown, and our people liberated, welcoming you with rose-petals in the streets of Teheran...

These assets are ready to be disbursed, and our nation ready to remake in the image of West democracies, but cannot now happen without your help – for which said help we offer you this reward.

I have been delegated as a matter of trust by my associates and fellow dissidents to seek an overseas partner with financial means and military infrastructure to help us release these assets and this country.

... To free up these assets, all we require from yourself is the use of foreign accounts, funds, and seven armored divisions, plus relevant planes for air supports.

I've noticed this pattern with my Google Ads (for those of you with old 800x600 pixel screens, they appear off your screen to the right): whenever I criticize anything in my blog, up pop ads to sell you whatever I've just denounced. For example, in answer to Malcolm Gladwell disingenuous defense of pit bull dogs, I quoted a news story that a pit bull in Delaware yesterday bit a 3-year-old girl on the scalp and "swung her side to side like a ragdoll" while neighbors beat the beast with sticks and broom handles until it finally dropped the critically wounded child. So, what ads does Google dispatch?

But is the problem with Google or with me? Looking through this website, I don't seem to write much about anything related to spending money (which probably stems less from my St. Francis of Assisi-like principles than my negative cash flow), other than buying books or watching movies.

Do you have any suggestions for what my readers would be interested in buying?

One of the persistent rumors dogging Israeli high-tech firms is that some, at the insistence of Mossad, have installed "back doors" into their communications systems to allow Israeli intelligence to spy on their American customers. For example, FoxNews' five part investigative report in 2001 on Israeli spying on America charged that Israeli telecommunications firms AMDOCS and Comverse Infosys had used their contracts with the U.S. federal government to potentially spy on American defense secrets. (Fox quickly removed all mention of the series from its website, but, fortunately, private citizens saved copies.)

Last year, The American Conservative'sDeep Background column pointed out that Jack Abramoff, who has set up a "sniper school" for Israeli settlers in Palestine:

" ... allegedly convinced Congressman Robert Ney, House Administrative Committee chairman, to award a contract worth $3 million to a start-up Israeli telecommunications firm called Foxcom Wireless. The contract was for the installation of antennas in House of Representatives buildings to improve cell-phone reception. Not surprisingly, such equipment can be designed to have what is known as a "back door" to enable a third party, in this case Mossad, to listen in."

The FandZ International Law Group, "an Israel-based international law firm," was founded and run from 1986 to 2001 by Douglas Feith (the "F"), the Pentagon's #3 man from 2001 to 2005, and L. Marc Zell (the "Z"), who in the 1980s emigrated to a Jewish fundamentalist settlement in the Occupied Territories, where he has become a spokesman for extremist settlers. Right after the Iraq invasion that was planned and justified by Feith, Zell formed a law firm in Baghdad for the purpose of helping firms win contracts from Feith's Pentagon. Zell's partner in this venture was Salem Chalabi, who is the nephew of -- you'll never guess this in a million years -- Ahmed Chalabi, who provided Feith with so much of the fictional justification for the war that Feith stovepiped past the CIA and into the Vice President's eager hands. Isn't that cozy?

"The company acts as an intermediary between Israeli companies and the relevant authorities in the US, and according to Zell, it acts vis-à-vis the Pentagon, the Department of Treasury and the Department of Defense... "

The Department of Defense -- didn't Zell know somebody at the Pentagon? Well, I'm sure it was all just a coincidence ...

So, what name did Zell choose for his affiliate firm that would help put Israeli technology into the heart of the American national security apparatus? For a firm like that, you wouldn't want to pick a name with sinister connotations, not like something a James Bond villain would dream up, now would you?

Your article on Malcolm Gladwell got me pondering a thought I've had for years, ever since I heard my neighbor claim that Pit Bulls (or whatever they decide to call the breed nowadays) were an oppressed dog group: We Americans, as a whole, are so fearful of the subject of races of man, that we can't even admit the tendencies of different breeds of dog. As expected, this denial of race in both species can have dire consequences for society in general.

Another reader writes:

Did you catch the CSI episode where the murderous culprit turned out to be an otherwise adorable golden retriever? Seems the golden had fear issues and could go psycho under certain stressful conditions. Plus, the dog was a product of a broken family, that is, the husband and wife owners were going through a nasty divorce. Oh, and the husband had trained the retriever to have one of its stress attacks on a certain signal. Anyway, lovable Alf or Alfie lunged for the wife's neck, bit out a chunk of the jugular vein and then slurped up the blood from the leaking (and dying) victim. Hard to believe but, as Grissom says, you have to follow the evidence.

Ah, Hollywood, always warning us not to rely too much on our crude animal stereotypes. If a serial murderer is loose in your town, be on the lookout for an elegant Englishman walking his golden retriever.

In case you were wondering, of the 238 Americans killed by dogs between 1979 and 1998 where the breed is known, none were killed by golden retrievers. The golden retriever is apparently the second most popular breed in America (with the Labrador retriever well ahead in first place).

Jonah Goldberg continues his streak of raising interesting topics but not being able to figure out much that's interesting to say about them. Now, he's denouncing the Westminster Dog Show for ... eugenics! "Repugnant thinking that’s died out for humans is thriving at the Westminster Kennel Club... I think Westminster is racist." Take a deep breath, Jonah, and try to remember that dogs wouldn't exist at all if prehistoric humans didn't eugenically manipulate wolves in order to create a new race of canidsthat wouldn't eat the baby. Further, the wonderful working dog breeds that Jonah salutes exist because of eugenics. For example, Newfoundlands were bred to possess a genetic-based urge to save drowning people. Ah, the unmitigated horrors of eugenics!

The big problem with dog breeding today is that it's insufficiently eugenic. The kennel clubs have calcified. They are more interested in preserving the aesthetics of existing breeds than in creating new breeds with new functions as the politically incorrect 19th Century breeders did. It's easy to dream up new, improved races of dogs that would meet real needs. For example, my family can't own a dog because my youngest son is allergic to them. It's time for a massive program to create a new breed of dog that won't give asthma attacks to dog-loving kids. Or, there are some individual dogs that can fairly reliably sniff out cancer in people. They're better at it than my former doctor, who blithely let me reach the final stage of Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma undiagnosed. Let's create from them a breed of cancer-sniffing dogs.

January 31, 2006

Malcolm Gladwell on why his bestseller Blink was a load of hooey:Ross Douthat points me toward a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell called "TROUBLEMAKERS: What pit bulls can teach us about profiling" on why racial profiling shouldn't work. Bottom line: you can't trust your first impressions!

Now, if you shelled out cash to buy Gladwell's latest bestseller, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, you might ask him for a refund, since the point of Blink is that you should trust your first impressions. (Email him here about getting your money back -- I'm sure he'd love to hear from you.)

But, actually, as I pointed out in my review of Blink in VDARE.com a year ago, Gladwell's book boils down to two messages:

- Go with your gut reactions, but only when they are right.

- And even when your gut reactions are factually correct, ignore them when they are politically incorrect.

You can see why Gladwell is against racial profiling: because if he came out and said the truth -- "Of course, racial profiling works to some extent" -- he could lose the enormous amount of money he makes lecturing corporate sales forces on The Power of Thinking Without Thinking ($30,000 per speech, according to New York magazine). Corporations are constantly being sued for discrimination by disgruntled minority employees, and none of them want to take the chance of a plaintiff in a bias suit pointing out that they hired a speaker who publicly engages in crimethink.

And if Gladwell told the truth he might lose out on that bizarre movie deal he recently signed in which Leonardo DiCaprio. of all people, is supposed to play Gladwell in the movie version of Blink. (Steven Gaghan of "Syriana" notoriety is on board to write and direct.) I can't wait to see DiCaprio's version of Gladwell's Afro, the growing of which supposedly inspired him to write Blink by causing him to be hassled by The Man.

Gladwell gets on my nerves because he actually is a smart guy who could spread clarity rather than squid ink. But instead he chooses to use his cleverness to dream up facile but wrong arguments in order to make money, lots and lots of money.

The bulk of Gladwell's new article is an attack on laws outlawing the keeping of pit bull dogs as an analogy for why racial profiling shouldn't (or wouldn't or couldn't -- it's not clear which) work. Of course, it would be a lot simpler for Gladwell to simply look at racial profiling of humans rather than to draw Rube Goldberg analogies with pit bulls, but the last thing Gladwell wants to do is put himself in a position where he'd feel obligated to cite actual data on racial differences in crime rates.

Anyway, the anti-pit bull laws are hardly a direct analogy to racial profiling by police. A much closer analogy would be when the cops pay more attention to a pit bull running loose than to a Labrador retriever running loose. And is that really so morally reprehensible or pragmatically ineffectual?

But if you go look up the data on people killed by dogs, you find that of the 238 deaths from 1979-1998 for which the breed of dog is known, 66 were due to pit bull-type breeds (along with 10 people killed by part-pit bull mixed breed dogs). Pure-bred Rottweilers were far back in second place with 39 kills and pure-bred German Shepherds in third with 17. Unfortunately, we don't have terribly good data on the number of dogs by breed, but certainly the Labrador retriever is vastly more common than all the various pit bull breeds combined, yet only one person in those two decades was killed by a pure bred Labrador (and four by part Labradors).

Moreover, the danger to children (who comprise about 70% of dog fatalities) from pit bulls relative to Labradors is even worse than these numbers suggest because sensible dog owners buy dog breeds based on likely exposure to children. If you have a small child, you are much more likely to buy a Labrador to be his pet rather than a pit bull.

Gladwell misses the salient point about bulldog breeds -- they tend to be wonderfully loyal to their owners, but precisely because they are so monogamous in their loyalties, they can be dangerous to others, such as your child's friends, for example, if they get into a fight with your child. In contrast, Labradors are promiscuously friendly, so you don't have to worry about your Lab eating a guest who gets out of hand at your kid's birthday party.

Gladwell makes a big deal about how profiling doesn't work because of supposed "instability" in the relationship between a category and a behavior:

It doesn’t work to generalize about a relationship between a category and a trait when that relationship isn’t stable ... Does the notion of a pit-bull menace rest on a stable or an unstable generalization?... Pit-bull breeds led the pack [in fatal attacks], but the variability from year to year is considerable.

But that's just statistical noise caused by there being only a dozen dog bite fatalities per year on average. In Table I of the report that he's looking at, it shows dog bite fatalities for ten pairs of years from 1979-1980 through 1997-1998. Pit bull-types were the most lethal breed in six of those ten time periods, and were no lower than tied for second most lethal breed in the other four, which is highly stable for such a small sample size.

The only big change in the numbers is that Rottweilers became more deadly over this period. As the report notes, this is partly due to the increased population of Rottweilers. But, it's probably also due to selective breeding for ferocity in Rottweilers.

The personality of dog breeds can be altered genetically in a strikingly short period of time. The Doberman pinscher, for instance, tends to be much milder today than in the past due to a selective breeding program to improve its reputation. In response, the kind of folks who want vicious dogs seem to have shifted their attention to breeding Rottweilers.

So, the problem with laws banning pit bulls is that evolution can work so fast under conditions of artificial selection that the people who like vicious dogs could create some other breed as deadly as pit bulls in a decade or two. For example, in recent years, we've seen the introduction into the U.S. of the Presa Canario, a 120 pound fighting dog from the Canary Islands. After a Presa Canario that was being bred to guard Mexican meth labs killed a female lacrosse coach in San Francisco, interest in this breed from hell shot up.

That doesn't mean it wouldn't be a good idea to outlaw pit bulls from your municipality, after all, you could get 20 years or so of benefit from it, but it does show the complexity of the problem.

But what does the malleability of dog breeds have to do with the effectiveness of racial profiling?

Not much at all. The nice liberal position is that humans couldn't possibly have evolved fast enough to diversify racially in the 50,000 or more years since they left Africa. That's silly, but in any case, this is all utterly irrelevant to the question of policing tactics in 2006.

As an example of "instability" that makes profiling unusable, Gladwell cites the decline in crime in New York City:

... the relation between New York City (a category) and criminality (a trait) is unstable, and this kind of instability is another way in which our generalizations can be derailed.

But, this is just Gladwell yanking our chains, because he knows perfectly well that "New Yorker" is not a race. When it comes to racial profiling, the real question is whether blacks tend to be more likely than other races to commit street crimes year in and year out. And the answer to that question isn't hard to find.

Black men commit murders at a rate about eight times greater than that for white men. This disparity is not new; it has existed for well over a century. When historian Roger Lane studied murder rates in Philadelphia, he found that since 1839 the black rate has been much higher than the white rate. This gap existed long before the invention of television, the wide distribution of hand guns, or access to dangerous drugs (except for alcohol).

Racial profiling is an effective tool for cops -- indeed, it's almost unavoidable in the real world -- precisely because there are big differences in propensity to commit crimes. The most recent study of crime rates by race and ethnicity summarized:

"In total, blacks had the highest incarceration rate at 7.2 times the [nonHispanic] white rate, followed by Hispanics, at 2.9 times the white rate. [American] Indians and Pacific Islanders were imprisoned at about twice the white rate, and Asians at only 22 percent of the white rate."

In other words, Asian-Americans are incarcerated only 1/33rd as much as blacks. So, if you are cruising in a squad car, which group of teenagers on the corner are you going to pay more attention to: blacks or Asians?

But are these huge differences just caused by police prejudice? No. Wilson writes:

"... researchers have compared the rate at which criminal victims report (in the National Crime Victimization Survey, or NCVS) the racial identity of whoever robbed or assaulted them with the rate at which the police arrest robbers or assaulters of different races. Regardless of whether the victim is black or white, there are no significant differences between victim reports and police arrests. This suggests that, though racism may exist in policing (as in all other aspects of American life), racism cannot explain the overall black arrest rate."

What about racial profiling of terrorists? There is more change over the decades in who hijacks planes, but the ethnicity of airline terrorists hardly changes so fast that the Department of Homeland Security couldn't send out a memo to airport security screeners saying, for instance, "Okay, the Arab threat has disappeared, so stop profiling Middle Easterners. But now the Andaman Islands Liberation Front is a major source of hijackings, so pay particular attention to pygmy negritos and steatopygous women."

Obviously, that's silly. The Arab threat will be with us for a long, long time.

As will Malcolm Gladwell's lucrative disingenuousness.

By the way, Gladwell also makes the common but bad argument that if you start profiling for Arab terrorists, they'll just get people who don't look like Arabs to be terrorists. Obviously, though, it's much easier for Arab terrorist organizers to find Arab-looking people to be suicide bombers. When they have to go out looking for, say, Samoans who want to blow themselves up for the glory of jihad, well, that can slow operations down considerably.

UPDATE: A reader adds:

The average pit bull was always one of the friendliest dogs around, especially with children. If you were to buy one bred for fighting from a good ole boy from the south today, I am confident that would still be the case. I am learning, lately, that this is no longer the case among pits found in big northern cities. Idiots there have been breeding human-aggressive pits, often by crossing with other breeds. Combine this with the pit’s tenacity and bite strength and you have a dangerous situation.

UPDATE: Good timing, Malcolm: The day after I wrote about Malcolm Gladwell's article in the New Yorker on why profiling pit bulls is as wrong as profiling young black males standing on street corners or young Arab men getting on airliners, we see this new story from the Philadelphia area:

New Castle County Police said a three-year-old girl was critically injured after reportedly being attacked by a Pit Bull Monday. The dog was euthanized Tuesday morning.

Paramedics responded to reports of an attack on a small child by the family dog on the 100 block of Oakmont Drive just after 10:30 a.m. officials said.

When they arrived on the scene, authorities said they discovered three-year-old Destiny Campbell suffering from massive head injuries. She was transported to Christiana Hospital in critical condition.

Police said a four-year-old Pit Bull named ‘Diamond,’ allegedly mauled the child while she was with her mother at her grandmother’s house.

Destiny and her mother, Alycia Campbell, were picking up the child’s grandmother when the dog, belonging to an older cousin, Turquoise Robinson, attacked the three-year-old for no apparent reason.

“I tried everything to get her (Diamond) off my child, you know, I couldn’t do anything. I tried beating her with a cane, I tried everything, she swung her side to side like a ragdoll,” said Alycia Campbell.

After several attempts to free Campbell, her mother and grandmother screamed for help. Residents in the area responded, striking the dog with sticks and broom handles until it released the child.

“The dog had grabbed her by the crown and pulled off her scalp and bit off her right ear. She was in a state of shock,” said neighbor Toney Jackson.

January 30, 2006

This award will go to commentary that is overwhelmed by a tangential trip into the personal obsessions of the writer. This is a tricky category as some commentators specialize in certain subjects and therefore give their "take" on a story. One must distinguish carefully between an author's specialty where their expertise obliges them - and their obsessions.

In case anybody doesn't get the joke, I immediately nominated Andrew Sullivan for the Andrew Sullivan Award:

It would be hard to pick anybody for the initial Andrew Sullivan award other than Andrew and his obsession with the topic of torture. It's similar to the late Michel Foucault's obsession with prisons and bondage. Still, I think that an argument could be made that Sullivan has been turning his fascination with torture toward good ends, just as boys who are obsessed with fires, and have arsonist tendencies, often become firemen and make a noble career out of putting out fires.

So maybe there should two Andrew Sullivan Awards, one for sublimating personal obsessions toward good ends (as with Andrew and torture), and another for where self-absorption just overwhelms rational thought, as with Andrew and most other topics that are even remotely related to his gayness.

If you haven't seen it yet, I wrote a long profile called "Sullivan's Travails" for VDARE.com in the summer of 2001 that explains the interaction between Sullivan's writing, his personality, and his prescription testosterone intake.

January 29, 2006

To be sure, many of our finest Iran-watchers, including the great Bernard Lewis, believe that any future Iranian government, even a democratic one, is likely to continue the nuclear program.... But even if it is true, a democratic Iran will not be inclined to commit hara-kiri by launching a nuclear first strike against Israel, nor will it likely brandish its bombs against the United States.

Okay, but why would a non-democratic Iranian ruling class want to "commit hara-kiri" either? If you and your friends and family enjoyed the good fortune of owning a fairly big country like Iran and were looking forward to passing it on to your heirs unto the seventh generation, why would you turn your property into a radioactive crater by "launching a nuclear first strike against Israel," which is a Certified Tough Customer?

Gregory Cochran brings up another relevant question. When was the last time Iran started a war?

This can't be right (can it?), but the last time I can find for a truly aggressive Iran was the first half of the 18th Century, under the reign of Nadir Shah (1688-1747), who attacked everybody nearby, including Turkey, Oman, and Afghanistan. In 1739, he invaded India, sacked Delhi, and brought home Shah Jehan's Peacock Throne (whose gold and jewels were worth about $1 billion at today's commodity prices) and the Koh-i-Noor diamond (now a 186 carat gem in the Tower of London).

Stalin, who grew up on the periphery of Persia and was a close student of its history considered Nadir Shah one of his two main historical role models, along with Ivan the Terrible. The Encyclopedia Britannica sums Nadir Shaw up:

In the end he was assassinated by his own troops while attempting to crush an uprising in Khorasan. Nadir Shah's only interests were war and conquest. Once, when informed that there was no warfare in paradise, he remarked: “How then can there be any delights there?”

So, maybe if we read of the Iranians digging up Nadir Shah's body and cloning his DNA, we'd better start actively worrying about them eventually "launching a nuclear first strike."

More recent Iran-started wars than the 1740s: Yesterday, I asked if the last wars started by Iran could possibly be the invasions of neighbors by Nadir Shah in the 1740s, when he looted the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor diamond from India. Today, a reader points to the wars of Agha Muhammad Khan, who founded the Qajar dynasty in the late 18th Century despite being a eunuch. (In case you were wondering, he was succeeded by his nephew.) A few fun details from the always lurid history of Persia:

In 1795 he ravaged Georgia, a Christian kingdom to the north of Persia. In the same year he also captured Khorasan. Shah Rukh, ruler of Khorasan and grandson of Nadir Shah, was tortured to death because Agha Muhammad thought that he knew of Nadir's legendary treasures.

And there was short-lived Iranian occupation of Herat in northwest Afghanistan in 1856, although this description makes it sound like Iran might have been invited in by at least somebody in the neighborhood.

The independent rulers of Herat always turned to the Iranians for support against re-absorption into the Afghan kingdom. After complicated negotiations between Shah Nasr ed-Din and local Afghan provincial rulers, and despite British warning, Persian troops occupied Herat in October 1856. The British, whose policy it was to maintain the independence of this city, declared war against Iran. After three months the Iranians withdrew from Herat and committed themselves never again to interfere there or elsewhere in Afghanistan.

Of course, Iran hasn't been abstaining from invading other countries out of principle or pacifism, but out of weakness. For example, the British and the Soviets occupied Iran in the late summer of 1941 to keep open the supply line for American goods to Russia.

Blacks are much more likely than whites to get lung cancer from smoking cigarettes, according to a large study that provides significant new evidence in the debate over whether race plays an important role in health.

The eight-year study of more than 183,000 people found that blacks and ethnic Hawaiians are about 55 percent more likely than whites to develop lung cancer from light to moderate smoking. Japanese Americans and Latinos are about 50 percent less likely than whites, the researchers found.

Although previous studies have indicated that smoking poses varying degrees of risk to people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, the size and sophistication of the study, being published in today's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, make it the most convincing to date, the researchers said.

"We observed quite striking differences," said Christopher A. Haiman of the University of Southern California, who led the study. "This suggests there are racial and ethnic differences in the smoking-related risk of lung cancer."

The study rekindles a long-running and emotional debate about whether race is important in understanding why some people are more prone to certain diseases, whether treatments should be tailored to racial and ethnic groups, and whether biological differences help explain why racial minorities are so much more likely than whites to get sick, respond less well to treatment and die younger.

Well, that should be "some racial minorities:" the life expectancy of, say, Japanese-American women is now approaching 90 years.

Above one pack per day of cigarettes, however, the racial effect disappears. If you smoke as much as Edward R. Murrow, you're likely to wind up like him no matter who your ancestors were.

Can't we do better than use "Hispanic" as a racial category in medical studies? It's an ethnic category, so it doesn't belong in a study looking at the impact of genes. The use of "Hispanic" confuses doctors because in the East, "Hispanic" typically means "part black" and in the West, it means "part Indian." Would it be impossible to teach medical researchers and doctors to use ancient but more accurate terms like mulatto and mestizo? I realize those are currently considered insensitive, but needless death is more insensitive.

An interesting sidelight is that black kids don't smoke much at all these days. Black high school students only smoke about half as much as white high school students.

By the way, on a tangential note, here's an NYT article on the large number of black football running backs who play chess as a hobby. NFL stars Shaun Alexander and Priest Holmes promote chess for children. Quite a few black men play chess. At my old company, the guys who played chess everyday at lunch, half were black, whereas the male workforce was probably only 1/10th black.

The first African-American grandmaster is Maurice Ashley, who reached that rank in 1999.

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